It's meant to attract all those RedHat haters that think they are worse than MS. Blah, blah, blah. Fact is, it'll be pretty on a resume, and I've seen several posts on Monster and the like that say they want a RedHat certified person. It at least shows you're competent. If you can pass it, I'm sure you could manage your way around Debian, et al.
So only parodies with good taste are ok? Really though, there was plastered all over that this is not official Dilbert comics and all. Just like the linux.de incident recently, it's a cute mock of another product. If someone went to linux.de a couple weeks ago, and saw that slogan, are they going to think, "Oh my god! Microsoft has changed its slogan and now has a German Linux web site?"
Freedoms exist despite the content. But I'm sure there won't be the large surge of polite letters to the Dilbert folks like there are any other time this sort of thing happens...
That question really falls under the research part of preparation for Linux installation. What do you want out of Linux? If you're just installing it to be cool, or because someone said it was cool, sure you'll end up at a futile command prompt.
If you really want to look into what all Linux has, your best bet would be to pick up a book, RedHat comes with one and it's even available on their web site, or any of the $30-40 ones at a decent bookstore. They are written to take you step by step through navigating the command line, setting up X, setting up PPP, etc.
Without the proper help along these lines, you'd be just as stuck at a command line as I would be at Povray. Sure there's some cool pictures people make with it, but with no artistic talent, I'm pretty much helpless.
I believe they're talking about the newer P2/400 IBM 300GLs which use a S3Trio3D chipset. In XFree86, there is only support via the VGA16 server (so basically useless). Oddly, they don't even put an AGP slot in there, so you're stuck with just a couple PCI slots to put a video card in.
Why these oems always choose such crappy on-board stuff is beyond me. Well, it's because it's cheap, but still can't they get mediocre and supported chipsets? Sheesh.
I have a relative that does just this at his workplace. Four mediocre windows people can't operate that NT "firewall" they have. I've had to stop taking free calls on it. They don't know what they're doing, and they refuse to pay for a real admin like myself. Such is life...
Ultimately you get what you pay for. If a company doesn't want to hire a decent Linux guru to set up servers at 4000 of it's outlets that basically will be responsible for the chain's income, then use NT and suffer. Sure a $60k admin and a free OS may be a little more than a $30k mouse admin and $800 OS (what's the user limit on the basic NT server, like 25?). When it BSODs, reboot. If that fails, mail it back and be without a server for a week. In which case, you better have an old system on hand. So you'll have to pay to upkeep two whole systems. Yeah, I can see why NT should be used in every corporation.
Is anyone else bothered that ComputerWorld felt it necessary to say right off basically that no one has/will ever do anything this crazy ever (third paragraph). Sure crazy fringe organizations like the USPS, retail outlets like Burlington Coat Factory, NASA, countless ISPs and web sites use it. But remember it's just for a band of radical, hippy college kids using word processors and spreadsheets.
With press like this, what's there to complain about? Oh wait...
What are they supposed to do, take the money MS gave them for the study and spend it all on a mediocre sysadmin? Where's the fun in that? Look at what they have accomplished though. They get money from MS, they say NT kicks ass, MS is happy and may continue doing business with them in the future, their summary will be plastered everywhere (boy, that NT graph is higher, it must be tons better than this Linux thing), they get more and more attention. Very few PHBs these studies target read the details, know what parameters to Samba/Apache do, etc. And all these organizations continue spreading FUD studies...
On top of inetd, what if they used tcpd as well? Or the "KeepAlive Off" in apache's config? They don't specify the ServerType parameter, but in my httpd.conf, the comments say the default is Off. Talk about slowdown, one request per connection each having to be thread through inetd (and possibly tcpd)...
One thing that's bothered me through all hype about Linux sucking, these sort of "studies," etc: why are they always run by people who have no clue about the things they want to portray that they are experts on? Sure there isn't much to NT, click some Next buttons through wizards, and voila. So they apply that same sort of mentality to Linux, either taking a bare RedHat (or other distribution), or minimal customization. (The recompiling kernel causes you to muck up the entire system beyond recognition bit, my guess is they have no clue about bootable floppies, configuring LILO to have two kernel images for fallback, etc).
What about the 960MB memory thing? Just a matter of telling LILO append="mem=1024M" ? I know it freaked when I put in 96MB the first time, only seeing 64MB.
As others have said, the posts the the newsgroup contained some major flaws, not enough details, etc. That certainly would turn off many potential replies.
Microsoft sponsoring them? Wouldn't their credibilty be higher if sponsors were NOT the manufacturers of the products they are testing? To me that's a major problem. For respect, a study should be balanced and unbiased.
How can you expect to code in C++ without a browser?? The two innovations are so inter-woven, my brain is unable to comprehend attempts to separate the two. Hell, even a kernel, office suite, web browser, and programming languages cannot be separated. Who in their right mind would code in VB without first making their computer boot to a spreadsheet linking things from a database out on the web?? And all of this with a significant amount of personal information attached to each and every file, MAC address, IPs used from the last 6 years, weight, longitude, GPS coordinates. Users want these things, dammit, stop harassing me!!
As you can see, without integration of every component, computers are useless. I still can't figure out how to use the Calculator program that comes with Windowsbecuase it doesn't come up in IE. Users cannot be expected to figure out what all those buttons are supposed to do by themselves (where's that paper clip??).
Want to know what 36*36 is? Fire up the modem, connect to the Internet, download some ActiveX things, watch some Shockwave demos while you're waiting (better have a P3/500 at least too), and sooner or later you'll have the answer. Then two months later we find out there was a bug in the program and must pay $89 for the fixed dll and the actual answer to the original question. Wait, you installed a program by IBM? Well, no answers provided by your computer ever will be able to be trusted. Call up Gateway and get a new one, telling them it must be made of all MS products. That's the way of the future, folks. Embrace.
ringconnectd will allow a simple setup, but not (that I know of, a little tweaking could allow it) the sort of dual counts you suggest.
I used it for a long time with vgetty to act as an answering machine. If the phone rang once, it dialed up ppp. If it went for 4 or 5, I forget now, vgetty would pick up and record a message.
My beef with vgetty was that it would not play any message to greet callers. So only family/friends knew that when it beeped (it was quite a loud beep too), just start talking. The many times I tried, it either left the phone on hook until I went back home to reset it, or would just play an empty hiss for the length of the sound file.
If such would happen, you can guarantee ZDNet, MSNBC, etc would be right behind MS. And who's Joe Schmoe going to believe, some band of Linux weirdos at Slashdot and similar sites, or the supreme being, Mr. Gates, and trustworthy names like ZD, MSNBC, CNN, etc?
Which issue month of this magazine has the article? Magazines anymore come out with dates on em so far in the future, I want to get the right one. I was at a bookstore a few days ago, and they had some dated June 99. It's a crazy industry.
I tried loading a sb module with the same settings as the Windows driver reported. No luck.
As for Tribes, I hadn't noticed. I go through IP Masq, so they're not gonna get to my Win box. But try sitting on EFNet once in a while, then you'll see telnets, ftps, etc coming in.
According to a quick search on the Linux Kernel mail list, no. Creative hasn't released the specs on the card, so we're all out of luck. Sad as that may be...
Hmm, not a bad idea. Perhaps some sort of filter based personal setting. Posts by certain people, subject lines, etc, could automatically start at what you want, then add/subtract points appropriately.
All these user settings that have been added recently have been wonderful. But, could you add an Expires: line in the HTTP header? As it is currently, the page has to reload with every click of the back button, and proxies aren't caching the pages. A brief expiration time, say 10-15 minutes would be perfect. It would allow one to quickly go back and forth with less stress on the Slashbox(es?), and it'll reload fairly often so one can pick up the latest articles and comments.
My biggest beef with NT is the filesystem. How can you have a system where when one file is corrupted, say NTFS.SYS or other important file, with a filesystem that you cannot write to from DOS or anywhere, you have to reinstall the entire OS (the repair bit fails many times)?
It's ridiculous how anyone is willing to put their entire company on that OS...
A computer lab at a school is nothing to judge idiots against. The majority of users there want/need to learn how to type a paper or whatever, or else they'll get F's and kicked out of school.
Pick up a job as a tech support sort of worker in a real company. Where most people are 40+ and could care less about learning anything. They just want to come in, survive 8 hours, and go home until the day they retire. Then you'll see the true definition of idiots, refusal to learn things like their password, etc.
Now, if a distribution wants to be a distribution for geeks or people who really want to learn that's fine. There will always be other distributions for newbies and people who want to use a Linux workstation, not learn all the intricate parts of Linux. Those sort of distributions should lock down things by default, no daemons whatsoever, etc.
All "peers" means in this sense is normal, every-day citizens, not some board of judges, elected/appointed by the governor or anything.
Sure, it'd be nice if say, this person that started the Melissa virus had a jury of computer geeks, or people that at least know what a macro is. But it won't happen.
What happened to privacy? Well, basically commercialism. Microsoft (or just about any company anymore) wants to get as much information as they can on users (refer to that whole banking deal a while back). They've got an OS, office program, various programming programs, all using proprietary file formats. Now considering all this is done with closed source, no specs on the file formats, etc, who's going to know that there's MAC address and whatever else they want to include in your Word document? All the meanwhile, they are crying, "Closed information is the only way to be secure!! Open source means you'll be hacked into!! Arggggggggggh!"
Didn't the original articles on this information being in documents say something like it dated back even into the Windows 3.1 era? So, they've gotten away with it for all these years. And now we're starting to see just what these sort of companies want from us.
Starcraft was sending all kinds of information from the registry to their battle.net servers if you typed an invalid password, as well. Of course they wrap it around, "We did it to help our customers, yeah, that's it, help them." And Intel really just put the ID in the P-III as a replacement for cookies, remember web page settings, sure.
So all this is going on all these years, and people just don't care. They accept the products from giant corporations, and go with it.
With all this going on, Open Source really can take the lead in security/privacy concerns. We need to shout, "Here are our guts, program code, file formats, etc. Critique them, find holes/problems." Only with open sources can people be REALLY sure none of these scrupulous programmers include this sort of information in files.
Slashdot Mirror
It's meant to attract all those RedHat haters that think they are worse than MS. Blah, blah, blah. Fact is, it'll be pretty on a resume, and I've seen several posts on Monster and the like that say they want a RedHat certified person. It at least shows you're competent. If you can pass it, I'm sure you could manage your way around Debian, et al.
I particularly liked the "fatty queercakes" phrase. You don't see this sort of innovation at other humor sites. :)
So only parodies with good taste are ok? Really though, there was plastered all over that this is not official Dilbert comics and all. Just like the linux.de incident recently, it's a cute mock of another product. If someone went to linux.de a couple weeks ago, and saw that slogan, are they going to think, "Oh my god! Microsoft has changed its slogan and now has a German Linux web site?"
Freedoms exist despite the content. But I'm sure there won't be the large surge of polite letters to the Dilbert folks like there are any other time this sort of thing happens...
That question really falls under the research part of preparation for Linux installation. What do you want out of Linux? If you're just installing it to be cool, or because someone said it was cool, sure you'll end up at a futile command prompt.
If you really want to look into what all Linux has, your best bet would be to pick up a book, RedHat comes with one and it's even available on their web site, or any of the $30-40 ones at a decent bookstore. They are written to take you step by step through navigating the command line, setting up X, setting up PPP, etc.
Without the proper help along these lines, you'd be just as stuck at a command line as I would be at Povray. Sure there's some cool pictures people make with it, but with no artistic talent, I'm pretty much helpless.
I believe they're talking about the newer P2/400 IBM 300GLs which use a S3Trio3D chipset. In XFree86, there is only support via the VGA16 server (so basically useless). Oddly, they don't even put an AGP slot in there, so you're stuck with just a couple PCI slots to put a video card in.
Why these oems always choose such crappy on-board stuff is beyond me. Well, it's because it's cheap, but still can't they get mediocre and supported chipsets? Sheesh.
I have a relative that does just this at his workplace. Four mediocre windows people can't operate that NT "firewall" they have. I've had to stop taking free calls on it. They don't know what they're doing, and they refuse to pay for a real admin like myself. Such is life...
Ultimately you get what you pay for. If a company doesn't want to hire a decent Linux guru to set up servers at 4000 of it's outlets that basically will be responsible for the chain's income, then use NT and suffer. Sure a $60k admin and a free OS may be a little more than a $30k mouse admin and $800 OS (what's the user limit on the basic NT server, like 25?). When it BSODs, reboot. If that fails, mail it back and be without a server for a week. In which case, you better have an old system on hand. So you'll have to pay to upkeep two whole systems. Yeah, I can see why NT should be used in every corporation.
Is anyone else bothered that ComputerWorld felt it necessary to say right off basically that no one has/will ever do anything this crazy ever (third paragraph). Sure crazy fringe organizations like the USPS, retail outlets like Burlington Coat Factory, NASA, countless ISPs and web sites use it. But remember it's just for a band of radical, hippy college kids using word processors and spreadsheets.
With press like this, what's there to complain about? Oh wait...
What are they supposed to do, take the money MS gave them for the study and spend it all on a mediocre sysadmin? Where's the fun in that? Look at what they have accomplished though. They get money from MS, they say NT kicks ass, MS is happy and may continue doing business with them in the future, their summary will be plastered everywhere (boy, that NT graph is higher, it must be tons better than this Linux thing), they get more and more attention. Very few PHBs these studies target read the details, know what parameters to Samba/Apache do, etc. And all these organizations continue spreading FUD studies...
Ah what a world we live in.
On top of inetd, what if they used tcpd as well? Or the "KeepAlive Off" in apache's config? They don't specify the ServerType parameter, but in my httpd.conf, the comments say the default is Off. Talk about slowdown, one request per connection each having to be thread through inetd (and possibly tcpd)...
One thing that's bothered me through all hype about Linux sucking, these sort of "studies," etc: why are they always run by people who have no clue about the things they want to portray that they are experts on? Sure there isn't much to NT, click some Next buttons through wizards, and voila. So they apply that same sort of mentality to Linux, either taking a bare RedHat (or other distribution), or minimal customization. (The recompiling kernel causes you to muck up the entire system beyond recognition bit, my guess is they have no clue about bootable floppies, configuring LILO to have two kernel images for fallback, etc).
What about the 960MB memory thing? Just a matter of telling LILO append="mem=1024M" ? I know it freaked when I put in 96MB the first time, only seeing 64MB.
As others have said, the posts the the newsgroup contained some major flaws, not enough details, etc. That certainly would turn off many potential replies.
Microsoft sponsoring them? Wouldn't their credibilty be higher if sponsors were NOT the manufacturers of the products they are testing? To me that's a major problem. For respect, a study should be balanced and unbiased.
In conclusion, they are lunatics. Plain, simple.
How can you expect to code in C++ without a browser?? The two innovations are so inter-woven, my brain is unable to comprehend attempts to separate the two. Hell, even a kernel, office suite, web browser, and programming languages cannot be separated. Who in their right mind would code in VB without first making their computer boot to a spreadsheet linking things from a database out on the web?? And all of this with a significant amount of personal information attached to each and every file, MAC address, IPs used from the last 6 years, weight, longitude, GPS coordinates. Users want these things, dammit, stop harassing me!!
As you can see, without integration of every component, computers are useless. I still can't figure out how to use the Calculator program that comes with Windowsbecuase it doesn't come up in IE. Users cannot be expected to figure out what all those buttons are supposed to do by themselves (where's that paper clip??).
Want to know what 36*36 is? Fire up the modem, connect to the Internet, download some ActiveX things, watch some Shockwave demos while you're waiting (better have a P3/500 at least too), and sooner or later you'll have the answer. Then two months later we find out there was a bug in the program and must pay $89 for the fixed dll and the actual answer to the original question. Wait, you installed a program by IBM? Well, no answers provided by your computer ever will be able to be trusted. Call up Gateway and get a new one, telling them it must be made of all MS products. That's the way of the future, folks. Embrace.
ringconnectd will allow a simple setup, but not (that I know of, a little tweaking could allow it) the sort of dual counts you suggest.
I used it for a long time with vgetty to act as an answering machine. If the phone rang once, it dialed up ppp. If it went for 4 or 5, I forget now, vgetty would pick up and record a message.
My beef with vgetty was that it would not play any message to greet callers. So only family/friends knew that when it beeped (it was quite a loud beep too), just start talking. The many times I tried, it either left the phone on hook until I went back home to reset it, or would just play an empty hiss for the length of the sound file.
No offense to Tux of course, but she's not too bad to have on a sticker plastered to every computer...
If such would happen, you can guarantee ZDNet, MSNBC, etc would be right behind MS. And who's Joe Schmoe going to believe, some band of Linux weirdos at Slashdot and similar sites, or the supreme being, Mr. Gates, and trustworthy names like ZD, MSNBC, CNN, etc?
Which issue month of this magazine has the article? Magazines anymore come out with dates on em so far in the future, I want to get the right one. I was at a bookstore a few days ago, and they had some dated June 99. It's a crazy industry.
I tried loading a sb module with the same settings as the Windows driver reported. No luck.
As for Tribes, I hadn't noticed. I go through IP Masq, so they're not gonna get to my Win box. But try sitting on EFNet once in a while, then you'll see telnets, ftps, etc coming in.
According to a quick search on the Linux Kernel mail list, no. Creative hasn't released the specs on the card, so we're all out of luck. Sad as that may be...
Hmm, not a bad idea. Perhaps some sort of filter based personal setting. Posts by certain people, subject lines, etc, could automatically start at what you want, then add/subtract points appropriately.
All these user settings that have been added recently have been wonderful. But, could you add an Expires: line in the HTTP header? As it is currently, the page has to reload with every click of the back button, and proxies aren't caching the pages. A brief expiration time, say 10-15 minutes would be perfect. It would allow one to quickly go back and forth with less stress on the Slashbox(es?), and it'll reload fairly often so one can pick up the latest articles and comments.
So, what do yas think?
"NO ONE paid for this study."
Heh, it would be funny if no one bought the full study as well. All that work, and no $995 checks to make up for it.
Anyway, no one paid for the study beforehand, but they are in it for the money, obviously.
My biggest beef with NT is the filesystem. How can you have a system where when one file is corrupted, say NTFS.SYS or other important file, with a filesystem that you cannot write to from DOS or anywhere, you have to reinstall the entire OS (the repair bit fails many times)?
It's ridiculous how anyone is willing to put their entire company on that OS...
Just go to www.bpower.com yourself, click on job search.
A computer lab at a school is nothing to judge idiots against. The majority of users there want/need to learn how to type a paper or whatever, or else they'll get F's and kicked out of school.
Pick up a job as a tech support sort of worker in a real company. Where most people are 40+ and could care less about learning anything. They just want to come in, survive 8 hours, and go home until the day they retire. Then you'll see the true definition of idiots, refusal to learn things like their password, etc.
Now, if a distribution wants to be a distribution for geeks or people who really want to learn that's fine. There will always be other distributions for newbies and people who want to use a Linux workstation, not learn all the intricate parts of Linux. Those sort of distributions should lock down things by default, no daemons whatsoever, etc.
All "peers" means in this sense is normal, every-day citizens, not some board of judges, elected/appointed by the governor or anything.
Sure, it'd be nice if say, this person that started the Melissa virus had a jury of computer geeks, or people that at least know what a macro is. But it won't happen.
What happened to privacy? Well, basically commercialism. Microsoft (or just about any company anymore) wants to get as much information as they can on users (refer to that whole banking deal a while back). They've got an OS, office program, various programming programs, all using proprietary file formats. Now considering all this is done with closed source, no specs on the file formats, etc, who's going to know that there's MAC address and whatever else they want to include in your Word document? All the meanwhile, they are crying, "Closed information is the only way to be secure!! Open source means you'll be hacked into!! Arggggggggggh!"
Didn't the original articles on this information being in documents say something like it dated back even into the Windows 3.1 era? So, they've gotten away with it for all these years. And now we're starting to see just what these sort of companies want from us.
Starcraft was sending all kinds of information from the registry to their battle.net servers if you typed an invalid password, as well. Of course they wrap it around, "We did it to help our customers, yeah, that's it, help them." And Intel really just put the ID in the P-III as a replacement for cookies, remember web page settings, sure.
So all this is going on all these years, and people just don't care. They accept the products from giant corporations, and go with it.
With all this going on, Open Source really can take the lead in security/privacy concerns. We need to shout, "Here are our guts, program code, file formats, etc. Critique them, find holes/problems." Only with open sources can people be REALLY sure none of these scrupulous programmers include this sort of information in files.